Re: ::scr Re: Cognitive Friction

[jo walsh <jo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> ... humans are very good at quickly learning and 
> remembering key combination presses.  I think the gaming examples 
> illustrate theat well.  Left-Right-X for a 540 McTwist, and so on.
> 
> These things get programmed into what is sometimes referred to as "muscle
> memory", although I'm not sure how accurate that term is in a strictly 
> scientific definition.  Anyway, we do these things fast, as if on auto-pilot.

a few months ago i found my old clarinet in my granny's garage. i hadn't
picked the thing up for five years, or played it seriously for eight. 
being able to plug it together and play a perfect chromatic scale 
straight off was an amazing sensation. i found myself playing snatches of
pieces mostly that i'd learnt for examinations.

it struck me that the sequences that just came out innately were those
that were most difficult: crossing quickly back and forth over the bridge
between high and low registers, sequences i'd had to practice hundreds of
times to get right, burned into my muscle memory.  it took five
years of my childhood to become that what-feels-like-instinctive with that
interface, though.

now practised, i have a paradigm for interfaces of that kind, a set of
back-back-forward+punch type actions which i can apply to other interfaces
with a similar look and feel, like oboes and saxophones. as if i'd learnt
a programming language and could now find it exponentially easier to learn
another one. i have an expectation set. with no knowledge of the field i'd
say the expectation set of most games is pretty small. :) 

what was the bad word again? 'intuitive'. on the grounds the only things
we do intuitively are eat and sleep, fuck and sing? sorry, i just had a
few unhelpful words to share :)   

z